Talking about "involution" —— Reading Super Tortoise

"involution" is a popular word recently, and everyone must be familiar with it, which means irrational internal competition.

It is also said that the better people are, the more they choose involution. Why is this happening? It depends on how we look at Excellence. The pursuit of Excellence is transcendence and promotion for individuals, and it is a kind of competition from the perspective of groups. Therefore, Excellence is to a large extent a description of a person from the perspective of a group, and it is a description of the results of competition.

In the competition, in order to become better (especially when the standard of Excellence is relatively single), we have to work harder than others, even act rashly. This is also the basic logic of involution in education and the background of "theater effect".

Inside, everyone feels tired, but no one will give up. After all, lying flat is helpless. Everyone feels that something seems to be wrong, but driven by huge interests and under the pressure of giving up, everyone can't help but participate in the inner paper and get deeper and deeper.

Unless you are eliminated, you can only choose to lie flat. So some people say that negative people, hopeless people, will choose to lie flat. Of course, lying flat also requires capital.

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This reminds me of a picture book "Super Tortoise", but it has a sense of involution, which deeply depicts the personal actions and feelings in the involution. Based on the classic story "The Race between the Tortoise and the Rabbit", Super Tortoise explains a series of events and feelings that happened after the tortoise won the race.

1. Become an idol

After the tortoise won the competition, the audience was boiling. For a time, the tortoise was called a "superhero", while the rabbit who was good at running had long been forgotten, leaving only one person alone. Because people only look at the so-called results and only want some "gimmicks", people praise the tortoise in succession. The tortoise has become a hot topic and an image of people competing to imitate and publicize, which makes the tortoise a little overwhelmed.

Encounter contrast

The image of an idol has become something that others play with, which has little to do with the actual prototype tortoise and is not controlled by the tortoise. But the problem is that the tortoise climbed into the world of idol decoration from reality and suddenly encountered a huge contrast. I'm a little sorry for the attention and expectation given by the carnival audience in the idol world.

Bridging expectations

Under the pressure of the group, the tortoise also felt embarrassed and couldn't lift its head. He doesn't want to disappoint people, and he doesn't want the superhero sought after by everyone to be a joke. So the tortoise began to exercise hard, improve the speed, and let himself in reality meet everyone's needs and expectations for superheroes. Get him in there, from now on.

4. The involution effect

At first, the tortoise insisted on training from morning till night, and the speed gradually increased, which not only won the recognition of the audience. "Wow, it's really a super turtle!" And I'm quite satisfied with myself. Therefore, this encourages the tortoise to practice harder. No matter whether it is cold or hot, no matter day or night, there is only one thing in the turtle's life, and that is to practice hard and make himself faster and faster. Since then, the involution has become more and more severe.

5. Confusion about involution

In fact, the days of involution are not only the applause of others, but also the exhaustion of body and mind, and more importantly, the tear from the inner self. The tortoise is thinking now, if only I could have a good rest for a day! "He hopes to take a leisurely walk as before."

This "fast" day is getting harder and harder for the tortoise. Every time I look at myself in the mirror, I feel a thousand years older. Is this all you want? Or what others want?

But when the rabbit challenged again, the tortoise was nervous and anxious, and even couldn't sleep. What if he loses? Although I don't want to live too fast, once there is competition, I still don't want to lose and give up the flowers and applause I already have.

Return to self

However, the rabbit's challenge again made the tortoise who was really tired and sleepy lose. This time, the flowers and applause stopped abruptly. The tortoise is as lonely as the original rabbit, and some are deeply lost. The flowers and applause of the audience went to the champion rabbit, so this time only the lonely turtle was left. It was because there was no audience that the tortoise finally returned to himself and lived a leisurely life of his own. There seems to be nothing wrong with this.

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Turtles can return to their "slowness" and get out of the involution. Is it okay for people? To solve this problem, at least the following two questions need to be answered.

1. As a social animal, how can it be unaffected by others?

Man is a kind of social existence, which means that we are always in interaction and contact with others, and people are always influencing each other. In The Meaning of Human Existence-the Source of Social Evolution, the author points out that one of the unique characteristics of human species is that "we have a strong and even paranoid interest in others" P28, and the other is that "we have a strong instinctive impulse to the group to which we originally belong" P28.

The involution comes from inner competition and the desire to surpass others. In this competition, a rising tide lifts all boats, and eventually everyone will pay more for it. In the inner volume, everyone is actually seeking group identity and sense of efficacy, which in turn affects self-identity. In the end, I can't get rid of the group pressure. We always need to show what others expect of us. Just like turtles, we can't let others down. We should get up as soon as possible and roll up.

So we have to be influenced by others. As long as we are in a "quantity" environment, we will follow the "quantity". Once "rolled up", you can't get out unless you compete like a turtle and lose the attention of the group. At this time, we can choose to lie down passively, which is also a return to ourselves. However, this is by no means active, but the result of passive acceptance.

2. What is self?

The tortoise's ego is "slow", which is of course defined by ourselves. What about ourselves? What is our ego? How do we know ourselves? Then how do you get back to yourself? These are very complicated questions. Continuing the previous question, human beings, as social people, have a close relationship with society.

Self seems to be only related to "me", but in fact it is more related to others. Because "I" exists relative to "you" and "he", if there is nothing else, "I" has no meaning of existence. Therefore, the ego is closely connected with the other, and the ego is closely related to society and culture to a great extent. This point has been widely discussed in social psychology and cultural anthropology.

It can be seen that the self itself is constantly being constructed as an individual in social actions, which is not as obvious and fixed as the tortoise's "I", which brings us trouble to return to ourselves and easily leads us to lose ourselves in involution.

Finally, I want to say that it is not easy to get out of the involution, and it is even more impossible to take the initiative, unless you are passively out and choose to lie flat. Therefore, to get rid of involution, it is mainly necessary to start from the outside, such as system, mechanism, policy, culture and other factors to restrict and change the ecology of involution, otherwise individuals will only get deeper and deeper in it, or passively choose to lie flat.